take the trouble to acquire, right views in this quarter or that, and to
draw clear away from such or such a region of thought, for the sake of
keeping peace on earth and superficial good will among men.

It would be too harsh to stigmatise such a train of thought as
self-seeking and hypocritical. It is the natural product of the
political spirit, which is incessantly thinking of present consequences
and the immediately feasible. There is nothing in the mere dread of
losing it, to hinder influence from being well employed, so far as it
goes. But one can hardly overrate the ill consequences of this
particular kind of management, this unspoken bargaining with the little
circle of his fellows which constitutes the world of a man. If he may
retain his place among them as preacher or teacher, he is willing to
forego his birthright of free explanation; he consents to be blind to
the duty which attaches to every intelligent man of having some clear
ideas, even though only provisional ones, upon the greatest subjects of
human interest, and of deliberately preferring these, whatever they may
be, to their opposites. Either an individual or a community is fatally
dwarfed by any such limitation of the field in which one is free to use
his mind. For it is a limitation, not prescribed by absorption in one
set of subjects rather than another, nor by insufficient preparation for
the discussion of certain subjects, nor by indolence nor incuriousness,
but solely by apprehension of the conclusions to which such use of the
mind might bring the too courageous seeker. If there were no other ill
effect, this kind of limitation would at least have the radical
disadvantage of dulling the edge of responsibility, of deadening the
sharp sense of personal answerableness either to a God, or to society,
or to a man's own conscience and intellectual self-respect.

How momentous a disadvantage this is, we can best know by contemplating